To me, homesteading comes down to stewardship. I want to be the best possible steward of the time I’ve been given, my physical health, the land I have, and the animals that have been entrusted into my care. I want to be a good steward of knowledge, skills, and relationships and truly believe that intentional stewardship of those things is the best way forward. 

Homesteading As A Means Of Creating A Personal Legacy

I never set out to be a “homesteader.” 10 years ago, I was newly married and totally broke, living in a new city and very lonely, working a corporate job, commuting, and spending most of my time in front of a screen. On sunny days, I couldn’t help but look out the window 3 cubicles over and long for something different. Exactly *what* I wasn’t sure, but something deep inside kept nagging at me. 

Money was so tight back then that most of our food was coming from my volunteer job at the food bank. Seeing how much waste there was, even in a setting like that which utilized past-date groceries and restaurant cast-offs, a harebrained scheme was hatched: I was going to get some chickens, feed them the scraps we couldn’t utilize, and create a free, fresh egg factory right in my backyard. 

I’d never had access to many tools, but I had been interested in building and growing things since childhood summers spent with my grandfather in his workshop and garden. A survivor of the Great Depression and two wars, Grandpa fixed, reused, and recycled everything himself. He built his own house and most everything in it, grew a huge garden every year, bartered and traded all manner of items with neighbors and friends, and prided himself in only throwing away one black plastic bag of true garbage per year. 

Because my parents are missionaries and we constantly moved from place to place, I’d never even had a dog or a cat, but I mustered the dumb confidence to bring 4 chicks home from the feed store and put them in my bathtub. I scoured Craigslist and found a couple tools I could afford, raided my neighbor’s trash piles for a few weeks, and eventually hobbled together a little chicken coop built entirely of scraps. 

Fast forward 10 years and I now travel the country teaching folks like me how to pick up their first tool and plant their first seed in an effort to grow a totally different life. I’m self-employed and even got to retire my husband from his corporate career to work alongside me in our marketing and consulting business. In the mornings, evenings, and weekends, I farm 30 acres in Tennessee raising beef, dairy, pork, and poultry and am currently building a school to teach disappearing life skills. 

I grow/build/raise a lot of what we need, but to me, the word “self-sufficient” is a farce. My best friend Tyler and I run a small raw dairy selling yogurt at the farmer’s market. We tag team everything from cow care to kiddo care to make room to farm in the margins. 

I trade duck eggs for dollar credit at my favorite restaurant. I trade goat milk for duck meat from one of my neighbors. A few steaks earn me a nice stack of venison every year for the freezer from another neighbor. I get food scraps from our local CSA to feed my pigs and help them with spring planting and fall harvest in exchange for all the produce I need for canning and preserving. I help another neighbor utilize the waste from his commercial mushroom growing business and create incredible compost to share with our local farmers. 

I help a friend prep stock and occasionally help teach woodworking classes at his school in exchange for wood from his sawmill for various farm projects. Another friend owns an arborist company who saves dumping fees by leaving all his wood chips and logs at our farm. We use the chips for our composting and another friend helps me cut and sell firewood. 

But this didn’t all happen at once. It started right where I was a decade ago with what I had: the Dave Ramsay method of getting out of debt and squirreling away a few dollars, a few illegal chickens, and a couple raised beds built from fencing scraps. Then came the meat rabbits and the bread baking, learning to patch my clothes and thrift instead of replace, the fruit trees, a few more tools, and hosting weekly “family dinner” nights to cultivate new relationships while sharing the spoils from my 1/8th acre backyard “farm.” 

If you need permission not to do it all, here it is: it’s far better to do what makes sense for us, wherever we’re at in our current season of life, in a way that pushes us towards (rather than distracts from) our own unique goals. It’s better to build our skills slowly and intentionally as we learn to barter for, trade for, and buy the rest; support and take part in our local community; and be good stewards of what we have (time, money, energy, and capacity) than to burn ourselves and our families out and suffer alone.

Even though the phrase “self-sufficiency” was popularized during the Homestead Act, you better believe the original homesteaders knew who, how, and when to ask for help and when to lean into and show up for their local communities. As modern homesteaders, we will all be far better off if we realize that no matter what our own personal motivations to homestead are, being part of a community means being able to love those who are different from us, learn to meet them where they’re at, and practice living in service of those around us regardless of race, religion, or political view. 

Moving from one very extreme political climate to another opposite extreme and farming in both places was a stark reminder that we are all just doing what we believe is best for our families. It’s easy to sit at the table and have genuine, face to face conversations with our neighbors no matter what signs or flags they hang in their yards. When there’s a cold snap, our plants all freeze together. When someone’s tractor breaks down on the side of the road, we all stop to help. When a family suffers a tragedy, we all come together in support. 

Though I ditched the corporate career and the paycheck that accompanied it, today my life has a far greater sense of purpose and meaning than it ever could have with my prior trajectory. I work hard every day and go to bed tired with a full heart. I’m far from lonely; I’m never bored. I started “homesteading” unintentionally but soon started dreaming about creating a more meaningful life for my husband and the children I’ve wanted my entire life but still haven’t come. 

Our Sunday “family dinner nights” have a unique and wonderful cast of characters. I get to be an auntie to all the kiddos on the block. A few times a year we get to help with our neighborhood square dances. My best friend got married in our half-built barn and the whole community came together to make it beautiful. 

I still have to spend some time behind a screen every day to make ends meet, but it’s on my terms, on my schedule, and on my farm. And I think it’s important to practice moderation too: we eat really great food at home, but I’m not above stopping at a Taco Bell on a road trip. And you certainly won’t catch me refusing a slice of store-bought cheesecake that my non-farming neighbor serves me in their living room either. 

The last decade has brought a whole lot of smiles, scars, and tears. This homesteading life we’ve chosen certainly isn’t easy, but it is absolutely worth it. 

II. The Mindset of a Homesteader

Never Stop Learning

As I’ve gotten older, the more I learn about any given topic, the more I realize I still don’t know. My first year with dairy cows gave me a lot of confidence, but years 2-4 really humbled me and forced me to learn a lot more. As homesteaders, we will find the most success if we adopt the mindset of a perpetual student. 

10 years ago, I started carrying around a little pad of paper and a pencil with me at all times. I developed a habit then that has served me incredibly well ever since: I am constantly observing, taking notes, asking questions. I learn more sitting in a field with my animals and observing their behavior than I could learn in a month of classes. I know I can’t trust my brain to remember things, so taking notes and then reviewing those notes once a week and adding pertinent data to various spreadsheets, calendars, trackers, etc. has made tracking farm expenses, breeding schedules, heat cycles, medication delivery, ordering supplies, planting times, and feed/seed/garden planting needs SO easy. 

The phrase “readers are leaders” has always stuck with me. I am severely dyslexic and really only learned to read well as an adult. When I started building and growing my own food, I was so motivated to learn, I forced myself to figure it out. There weren’t a ton of other resources available, and I happened to live across the street from the library, so I started checking out books on regenerative agriculture, composting, animal husbandry, and becoming more self-sufficient by the stack. I developed a system of highlighting and note-taking that not only helped me to understand the material, but also to synthesize and retain the things I was learning. 

YouTube wasn’t really a thing yet, and in retrospect, I’m pretty grateful that that’s the case. It’s become an incredible resource over the last decade, but there’s also a ton of bad advice and untested theories being shared around the online community. And, the sheer volume of options available can be crippling to a beginner who doesn’t yet know how to filter through it. I will say, though, that starting my own YouTube channel was super helpful for me in my own desire to learn at a faster pace because the best way to learn anything is to turn around and teach it. 

To date, the books that have helped me most are The Urban Farm Handbook by Annette Cottrell, You Can Farm by Joel Salatin, Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shepard, Dirt to Soil by Gabe Brown, Holistic Management by Allan Savory, and The Intelligent Gardener by Steve Solomon. 

As audiobooks became more popular, I’ve started listening to audiobooks while driving my car, when working in the garden, or when I’m on my tractor. I’ll often listen to a book once through and, if it’s got good info in it, I’ll buy a hard copy of the book so I can highlight, write notes in the margins, and use it as a reference moving forward. 

There are also tons of in-person options to learn: local farm classes, The Natural Resources Conservation Service, my local agriculture extension offices, and homesteading conferences seem to be popping up all over the place.

One of the best tips I got early on was from my vet. She told me to go hang out at my local farm co-op and talk to the folks that shopped and worked there because they tend to have a really good handle on what’s going on, what works where, who’s doing what, and how. I used to go to the co-op and spend hours reading labels, drinking free coffee, and asking LOTS of questions. 

The Importance of Meticulous Record Keeping

I alluded to this above, but because I don’t trust my brain to remember anything, becoming a meticulous notetaker and recordkeeper has been my key to success with learning, time management, financial management, and managing our animals on the farm. 

I always have a stack of 3×5 notecards and a pen in my pocket. Anytime I’m out with the animals and notice signs of heat or interesting behavior or anything else noteworthy, I jot down a quick note about it. When I’m in my barn and realize I’m getting low on a certain type of feed or minerals or that I’m almost out of paper filters for our raw dairy, I take a note. When I administer medications, I put a note on the calendar. With recurring monthly medications, I have several monthly alarms set to remind me to administer them.

If I’m reading and a specific quote or factoid pops out at me, you guessed it: another note. I keep track of how long each chore takes me in the morning and count how many steps I’m taking between point A and point B when doing repeated tasks. I’m always on the lookout for a way to make repeated tasks easier, quicker, or better yet, automated. 

On Friday mornings, I review all my notes and receipts from the week and input them into a farm/business/personal life/learning database I’ve built out on my computer using the free app called Notion. It makes everything keyword searchable, and has “add to calendar” functions and project management software built right in. It’s been a huge game changer for me both personally and professionally. It’s helped me bring clarity to chaos and has trained me to be a far better observer. The best farmers I know are really good at being intentional observers. 

Flexibility and Adaptability: Clarity in Chaos

The motivation to continually improve my observation skills, note taking, and recordkeeping (and boy howdy, do I need that motivation because NONE of this comes easily to me) comes from the fact that farm life tends to present a certain level of chaos. The first few years of farming felt like I was constantly putting out fires. I rarely felt like I had the time or even the clarity of mind required to work ahead or do anything more than simply attend to whatever fire was burning hottest in that particular moment. 

But the antidote to chaos is clarity. Having cold, hard data to look at (hence the need for meticulous recordkeeping) helps us cut through the emotion and sunk cost bias we often face, especially when farming, and make data-driven decisions that will serve us and our long term priorities and goals. 

Pace Yourself: Minimalism vs Chaos

Less is better. I’ve learned a lot of lessons about the value of minimalism by being a maximalist for most of my life. If I *could* impart one thing to you as you’re getting started, it would be this: take things slow. Be patient and intentional. Master one thing at a time, build infrastructure as you go, and use a systems-based approach to streamlining every task you regularly tackle. Become a professional observer. Learn to track everything from finances to time to the number of steps you take doing repeated tasks. Don’t buy land without fences or water systems and get a whole bunch of animals right off the bat and hope for the best. 80% of farmers quit within the first 18 months of purchasing their land because they get in too deep too quickly and don’t know how to get themselves out.

My friend Daniel Salatin says, “If you’re spending more than 30% of the time you have allocated to do a task (2 hours for chores, for example) doing something you’re going to have to do again tomorrow, you’ll never be able to get ahead.” And he’s right. Getting animals before we have infrastructure to support reliably containing and caring for them in a time and effort-efficient manner is a recipe for disaster. 

Multi-tasking is a myth. Juggling ten things at once can often *feel* productive because there is a sense of urgency that directs action, but true productivity and efficiency come from focus. Juggling too much makes us feel busy, often a lot busier than we actually are, and it also guarantees some things will get dropped. Often those dropped balls come back to bite us later, forcing our full attention whether we have time in the moment they need us or not. Things like putting off donkey hoof maintenance today can turn into three weeks, and then, before we know it, they’ve got an abscess in their foot and the vet needs to be called. All of a sudden, we have to find several extra hours a day to soak hooves and wrap legs. 

Giving something my full focus and seeing it through to completion is still one of the hardest things for me to do. But I also know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it’s worth forcing myself to push through and finish. That doesn’t mean I’m not managing multiple projects short and long term on the farm on any given day/week/month/year, but it does mean that I’m intentional about what I choose to do and when. And once I’ve chosen it, I’m *only* doing that one thing, giving it my full focus either until I’m finished or until my alarm rings to let me know it’s time to move onto the next item on my calendar. Implementing a system of time blocking, personal deadlines, and calendar/priority management has been absolutely life changing for me. I’d love to write more on it, but that’s a whole other article for another time. 

In my dream world, you’d take my advice and take one season with your only goal being to plant a small garden. You’d get only a couple of one entry-level animal species at a time, and you’d try to learn one new skill at a time. You’d have success and find greater joy and hope and confidence to tackle the next thing with each new endeavor in turn, growing as you learn and develop systems, speed, and infrastructure to support the enjoyable and efficient management of each endeavor as you go. 

The greatest benefit of starting where we are at right now with what we have available (aside from the obvious financial savings) is that we are forced to be more resourceful. We start more slowly and intentionally. Learning to bake bread is super intimidating at first, and each loaf takes time, mental energy, and focus. But after a few months, baking bread is just an automatic habit, part of your meal prep strategy. A few months in, you can talk on the phone while baking, put a pot of stock on to boil while you knead, and clean the chicken coop while you let the bread rise. But if you try to do all of those things for the first time all at once, disaster and overwhelm is likely to strike. 

If I’d waited *until* I got out of the city to get my very first animals, build fences and infrastructure, start cooking from scratch, pick up my first tools, plant my first huge garden, and start investing in my community and tried to do it all at once, I very likely would never have even made it out of the city in the first place. 

One of my favorite books is called The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. That book, paired with the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, has had a massively positive influence on the way I’ve looked at how I tackle everything on the farm. 

I’ve always struggled with patience and consistency. I was told I should never get a milk cow because I wouldn’t be able to consistently milk her. But I knew myself, and I knew that having a milk cow would help me to become more consistent. My love and care for my animals goes far above and beyond my need for personal comfort. I knew that if I had a cow standing by the gate waiting for me to milk her every morning, I’d show up, and I did. And showing up to milk my cow every morning also meant I was ready and able to show up for a whole lot of other good, important things for the rest of the day too. 

Commitment and Determination: Understanding the Dedication Required

In case you didn’t catch this above, I was the one who got land and a ton of animals I’d never had and tried to learn and do all the things all at once. It resulted in a whole lot of heartbreak, hard-learned lessons, and a few years of absolute chaos and unrest, physically and mentally. I nearly lost everything important to me in the process. 

It is because of sheer stubbornness and the fact that I had an excellent support system at the time that I didn’t lose it all. We all need a certain amount of grit and stick-to-it-ness as farmers, but it also doesn’t have to be hard and miserable all the time. 

There are going to be hard things. That is unavoidable. But it’s been my experience that when one thing falls apart, without the right fail safes in place, the attention required to fix that first thing in that moment has a cascading effect on other important things getting neglected. Pretty soon, it’s all chaos, all the time. 

Mental Toughness, Identifying Our “Why,” and Staying Focused on the “How”

When you’re delivering a stuck baby in the barn in the middle of the night with very little sleep, or when a hail storm in July obliterates your entire garden, or when your tractor breaks down and your roof is leaking and there’s not enough money to fix either, or when you have to bury a beloved animal or let go of a dream… those are the moments it is absolutely crucial you have, in a more peaceful moment, identified, said out loud, written down, and shared with loved ones “why” you are doing this. 

Excitement, energy, and passion fade. A sense of purpose carries us through the hard moments. 

The “why” informs the “how.” I often get asked about how I maintain my motivation, how I seem to have superhuman time management skills, and how I seem to do “all the things, all the time.” Motivation isn’t something that we wait on to get started. It shows up amidst positive feedback as we’re learning new things and enjoying the process, as we’re experiencing the pride of a job well done, as we’re gaining momentum. Motivation isn’t how we start; it’s how we keep going. 

Time management happens pretty naturally when we are crystal clear about what is important to us, how much time we have available, and how long things *actually* take. That’s where time tracking comes in super handy. We are really good at making time for the things that we are passionate and excited about; stalling or procrastinating is usually due to a lack of clarity about next steps. 

If you find yourself getting stuck, break your tasks into smaller, more actionable steps. If you can’t do that on your own, ask for help. I often get stalled on farming projects because I’m just not sure what to do next or who I should call. When I’m really stuck, I do what my vet told me to do years ago: I drive over to the co-op and start asking questions to whoever happens to be there. If they don’t know, farmers are pretty good about referring us to someone who might. 

As for doing “all the things, all the time,” remember that multitasking is a myth. Don’t compare where you are right now to where you see someone else who’s been at this a while. Slow is steady; steady is fast. Practice patience, develop consistency, and always be on the lookout to make the things you do every day more efficient, or better yet, more fun. 

There is so much goodness we can squeeze out of this one, beautiful life we’ve been given. Let’s go outside, get our hands dirty together, and find it.